During the summer of 1659, popular hostility toward sectaries culminated in violent assaults on Quakers and other radicals in London, Lancashire, Cheshire and Somerset. William Walke's raging assault at the Bradford excise house in May expressed his and others’ growing resentment of the failing excise administration and its vilified collectors during a period of declining trade. As tensions rose between the army and the Rump Parliament in August, a Presbyterian royalist uprising broke out in the north-west. But for Parliament's quick gathering of forces, London would have been embroiled in unrest as well. Though General Lambert's troops quickly suppressed Sir George Booth's royalist insurrection, the demands for a free Parliament began a fresh dialogue over the legitimacy of the Rump Parliament and the future of the nation.

Exploiting the unraveling events at home, Charles Stuart issued a proclamation to his “loving subjects” in England from Brussels in October 1659. Echoing popular sentiments, Charles promised that upon his return “A free and legal Parliament” would be “summoned”. In tune with a chorus of royalist tracts, Charles's proclamation attempted to equate the growing desire for a free Parliament with a push for his Restoration, suggesting that only he could ensure Parliament's “privilege” would be “maintained”. The proclamation also ridiculed the Rump, and Charles jeeringly referred to the body as “that Tail of a Parliament remaining”. Throughout the proclamation, Charles assured the exhausted nation that he would alleviate their burdens and eliminate the “confusion” which prevailed. The army would be disbanded after being dutifully paid with money procured in a “Parliamentary way”, and only the old garrisons would remain. Further, troublesome and illegal impositions such as the “Excise” and “Free-quartering” would be eliminated, while taxes would be raised in accordance with the “Magna Charta and the Petition of Right”. His promise to recompense the purchasers of Bishop, Dean and Chapter lands announced the return of the Church of England. Charles stated that Parliament would be endowed with the responsibility of “settling the Protestant Religion” in a manner that would protect “liberty for tender Consciences”. Charles expressed the hope that his illicit proclamation, printed on a broadside, would be distributed “freely” through the usual networks, noting that “many scurrilous and lying Pamphlets fly abroad without our control”. Thus began the first production of Charles's public claims to alleviate “all” of the people's “grievances”.

❧ ‘A better market crier than an opera librettist’: Cousser's Ariadne

IN complete contrast to the scheduling of works for the Braunschweig opera house in 1691 – during which four Italian drammi per musica and only one German-language work, a repeat of Cousser's Cleopatra, were performed – 1692 saw the tables turned. Strikingly, three operas by Cousser received their premiere performances at the theatre: Ariadne, Andromeda and Jason, while a fourth, Narcissus, Cousser's setting of a libretto by Gottlieb Fiedler (Fidler), was performed in October at an unknown venue (probably the Wolfenbüttel court theatre). While the catalyst for this change is now unknown, the decision no doubt resulted a range of motives, both cultural and commercial. As well as fulfilling Anton Ulrich's long-term desire to support German language and literature as a leading member of the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft, Germanlanguage works were perhaps thought to attract larger audiences. Whatever the case, through the composition and production of these four works Cousser played his part in the development of German-language opera in the Holy Roman Empire, although the lack of extant music makes his contribution difficult to assess. For while a selection of music has survived for Ariadne, the nature of the three other operas (Andromeda, Jason and Porus) must be pieced together from librettos, set designs and financial records.

It may also be possible that Cousser's increased compositional output in 1692 was aided by a happy change in his personal circumstances. By 1691, Cousser was in his early thirties, and his stable position at the Wolfenbüttel court had enabled him to marry. At Braunschweig's cathedral on 26 August, he wed Hedwig Melusine von Damm (1668–1749), the youngest daughter of a local Burger, Jürgen von Damm (1639–70), and his wife Anna Sophia (née Schomerus; 1643–91). The couple's first child, Augusta Elisabetha (Lieschen), was born on 1 June 1692 and baptized in their Wolfenbüttel home several days later. The following year a second daughter arrived, Charlotta Margareta (1693–1769), born on 27 December and baptized three days later, again in the family's residence.

Yet not everything was running smoothly, for in September 1691, less than a month after Cousser's marriage, difficulties caused by Bressand's administration of the Braunschweig opera house led to Anton Ulrich's failed attempt to employ Gerhard Schott as the theatre's new manager.

The Novalesa Miscellany, a manuscript now housed at the Newberry Library in Chicago, has its genesis in two separate eleventh-century segments bound together long before it left the collection of the Monastery of Saint Peter in Novalesa in Italy's Piedmont region. The Miscellany is best known for its second section of sixteen folios containing the first two books of Paul the Deacon's Historia Langobardorum with elements interpolated specifically for the monastery and its history. The often overlooked first section, made up of 107 folios and written at some point earlier in the eleventh century, contains a number of tracts and texts on religious themes and hagiographic material collected specifically to serve the monastic community in Novalesa at an important time in its history. Its existence in Novalesa reflects the concerns of a monastery reclaiming its status after a period of abandonment and re-establishment, as well as the monastic networks which helped to provide it with suitable material for recapturing its legacy.

The first of Novalesa's concerns in the eleventh century was to recover its history. Originally founded in the eighth century by Abbo, a wealthy Frankish aristocrat with land holdings based in Provence, the monastery flourished subsequently and reached the height of its prosperity in the middle of the ninth century; however, the community was forced to abandon the site in the first decade of the tenth century on account of external threats. Although eventually re-established, the surviving community of monks had lost their original library and much of their institutional knowledge and history. The period of the eleventh century was therefore marked by attempts to regain both, processes that also led to the creation of the Novalesa Miscellany. With this background in mind, the purpose of this paper is threefold: to clarify the provenance of the content of the Novalesa Miscellany; to trace the origins of its unique so-called ‘glossary’ of Greek terms; and to reassess the purpose of the donations recorded on the final folio of the first section of the manuscript, as a means to understand the Miscellany's role as one of the many efforts in the eleventh century focused on the restoration of the abbey of Novalesa.

❧ Music at the Wolfenbüttel Court of Duke Anton Ulrich

SOME time during the latter months of 1689, Cousser joined the service of Duke Anton Ulrich of Braunschweig and Lüneburg (1633–1714), whose court was based in the small town of Wolfenbüttel (Lower Saxony). The earliest known confirmation of his presence there is found on the title page of the printed libretto of a German-language opera, Julia, which acknowledges the work's composer to be ‘M[onsieu]r Cousser, Princely Braunschweig-Lüneburg Kapellmeister’. Julia had premiered at the Braunschweig opera house in August or September 1690, while a further work of Cousser's composition, Cleopatra, is believed to have received its first performance at the theatre's inauguration earlier that same year, on 4 February. By the time he left the service of the court some four years later, in 1694 (or possibly late 1693), Cousser had supplied Anton Ulrich with seven original operas, all settings of German texts: Cleopatra and Julia (1690), Ariadne, Andromeda, Jason and Narcissus (1692) and Porus (1693). With exception of only one – Narcissus – these works all received their premiere performances at the new Braunschweig theatre. Indeed, until 1693, when at least four new operas were also commissioned from other composers (Johann Philipp Krieger, Philipp Heinrich Erlebach and Georg Bronner), Cousser's appear to have been the only settings of Germanlanguage librettos to be performed at the venue.

Regrettably, no documentation concerning Cousser's engagement as Anton Ulrich's Kapellmeister has survived, nor have any documents detailing the size or structure of the Wolfenbüttel Hofkapelle during these years. There was presumably a stable body of instrumentalists (capable of performing on stringed and wind instruments), and, as was commonplace at the time, the court appears to have employed (or at least had access to) a contingent of trumpeters, kettledrummers and Hautboisten, since a description of a progress from Wolfenbüttel to Salzdahlum in 1694 refers specifically to their presence. In addition to the composition, rehearsal and musical direction of operas, Cousser's role at the court surely entailed the standard responsibilities allotted to court Kapellmeister in the late seventeenth century.

The early thirteenth-century fabliau Les Tresces tells the story of a knight whose wife takes a lover. Upon discovering the adulterous pair, the husband attempts to accost the lover, but the wife enables his escape. The husband throws his wife out of the house and forbids her to return. However, the wife plans a ruse to fool her husband and return to her home as an unjustly accused woman. She approaches a neighbor woman whom she physically resembles and asks her to pretend to be the adulterous wife and beg the knight to take her back. After much cajoling, the neighbor woman agrees. Though the neighbor was led to believe her efforts would restore the couple's marriage, what takes place is one of the most graphic descriptions of domestic violence within the fabliaux, and indeed within Old French literature as a whole:

Out of the bed the husband surged, never had he a greater urge to beat a woman than to beat the one who knelt before his feet. On each foot he strapped a spur and nothing else, confronting her naked but for the shirt he wore. He came and seized her hair and bore her body down upon the ground. Around her head his fingers wound. He yanked and jerked and pushed and pulled until his hands could hardly hold. A hundred lines of blood he drew across her flanks and belly too, striking and raking with his spurs. … He beat, and kept on beating her and the more he beat, the angrier he got and heaped her with abuse … the woman wailed and sniffled and gulped for he had beaten her to a pulp … her outcry so abused his ears. He became enraged instead and jumped like a wild man from his bed, dripping sweat from grief and anger, then leaped before her with a dagger and cut her tresses off. The shock was so severe for her, it struck her dumb, and she could weep no more. Her heart was weary to the core and almost burst from so much weeping. At last the husband left her … the woman was forced to drag herself half dead [from the house].

❧ Cousser and the ‘new or Italian art of singing’ in Hamburg

Some time late in 1693, or perhaps in early 1694, Cousser relocated from Wolfenbüttel to Hamburg. Two significant catalysts for Cousser's move were, surely, the opportunities offered by Hamburg's celebrated Goosemarket Theatre – the Holy Roman Empire's first public opera house, which had opened its doors in 1678 – and his personal dislike of the chief author of Germanlanguage opera librettos in Wolfenbüttel, Friedrich Christian Bressand. As it turned out, however, operatic life in the Hansestadt was not without problems of its own. In March 1694, the musical-theatrical landscape of Hamburg was recalibrated when the long-term proprietor of the Goosemarket Theatre, Gerhard Schott, signed a contract leasing the venue along with its costumes, stage machinery and scenery for a period of five years to Jacob Kremberg, a musician who had recently arrived from Dresden. A further selection of contemporary documents indicate that while Kremberg's role was that of theatre manager, Cousser was to be employed as the venue's musical director. Yet disagreements between Schott and Kremberg over the running of the theatre soon saw Cousser's allegiance turn to Schott. Before long, Cousser was holding rehearsals for his Braunschweig opera Porus in Schott's own home, and these were followed by public performances of the work in the refectory of Hamburg's cathedral, a venue that had earlier hosted a successful concert series held by Matthias Weckmann and Christoph Bernhard. In Cousser's place, Kremberg enlisted the Goosemarket opera's former music director, Johann Georg Conradi, who was known to Cousser from his time in Ansbach in the 1680s.

Yet despite these machinations, at least twelve operas were presented in Hamburg during 1694, although it is not always possible to determine which were performed on the Goosemarket stage and which were presented in the cathedral refectory. Five of the twelve had been performed in Braunschweig the previous year: Cousser's Porus, Krieger's Wettstreit der Treue and Hercules unter denen Amazonen, Erlebach's Die Plejades and Bronner's Echo und Narcissus. The other seven were works by Cousser (Erindo and Scipio Africanus), Bronner, Conradi, Reinhard Keiser, Krieger and Carlo Pallavicino.

In 1148, a navy under the command of Roger II, the Norman king of Sicily, sailed from Palermo to the North African city of Mahdia, which at the time was controlled by a dynasty of Muslim rulers called the Zirids. Once a nomadic Berber people, the Zirids had forged and ruled a kingdom in the region of Ifrīqiya – now Tunisia, eastern Algeria, and western Libya – during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as vassals of the Fatimid caliphate of Egypt. However, the Zirid emirs of Ifrīqiya were unable to stop the advancing forces of King Roger, whose conquests led to the formation of the Norman ‘Kingdom of Africa’ (1148–60). The Normans governed these African territories into the reign of Roger's successor William I ‘The Bad’, who came to power in 1154. The rule of the Normans in Ifrīqiya was short-lived, though, as civil unrest in 1156–57 brought an end to Norman rule in all of its African cities except Mahdia, which later fell to the Almohads in 1160.

During the time of their rule in Africa, Roger II and William I governed a complex administration that incorporated an ethnically and religiously diverse group of people. The Norman kings of Sicily ruled their African territories through a combination of Norman officials and local Berber chieftains. The Norman navy was commanded by an Armenian Christian who made alliances with Muslim leaders throughout the Mediterranean. Jewish traders in Ifrīqiya dealt in luxury goods from Egypt, wheat from Sicily, and gold from sub-Saharan Africa. Under the employ of the Normans was an Andalusian Muslim court geographer named Muhammad al-Idrisi, who crafted world maps that spanned from China to Iceland. Presiding over such a diverse and dynamic group of peoples, perceptions of Roger II and William I's rule was equally diverse. Latin and Arabic sources testify to the variety of ways in which medieval authors viewed Norman governance, particularly in Ifrīqiya.

At the heart of the varied perceptions of the Normans in these sources is the use of the title rex Africe (‘king of Africa’). Roger II never adopted the epithet rex Africe in his royal charters in the years following his African conquests (1148–54), instead preferring to use the title that Pope Innocent II bestowed on him: ‘king of Sicily, of the duchy of Apulia, and of the principality of Capua’.

In the twelfth century, there was an explosion of Latin encyclopedic investigations, which became the inspiration for a whole series of later Latin and vernacular treatises (known by such titles as Imago, Speculum, Trésor, Tesoretto, L'image, Mirroir, and Glasse). Over the next centuries there were ‘mirrors’ to advise princes; ‘glasses’, ‘conteinying the pleasant Principles of Cosmographie, Geographie, Hydrographie, or Navigation’, as noted in William Cunningham's 1559 Cosmographical Glasse; and specula, ‘representing the face of the world shewing both that it did begin, and must also end: the manner how, and time when, being largely examined’, as John Swan's Speculum Mundi put it in the seventeenth century; all testimony to the enduring popularity of the genre. Some ‘glasses’ could help the sinner repent, holding up to his gaze a mirror which revealed the imaginary nature of the vain pleasures he sought; others helped by providing a clear vision of the sinner to himself. At the root of almost all of these imagines, though, was the biblical ‘videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate’ (Romans 1:20). The vision we enjoy here is analogous to that provided by an old glass mirror that warps what it reflects. However, exactly what the mirror was held up to, or in what sense it was thought to provide a reflection, varied from work to work.

In this paper, I will focus on certain twelfth-century texts that aimed to deal with the world comprehensively. And although the understanding of ‘comprehensive’ and the methodology employed to attain it also varied from author to author, even within the same century, we nevertheless find persistently throughout the twelfth century an earnest desire to sketch pictures of the physical face of the whole of creation, to draw together into a unified presentation the totality of the world's plants, animals, climes, weathers, elements, harmonies, proportions, ligatures, connections – as if viewing the cosmos from above. Such an interest in exploring the world according to the laws of physica has been identified as a major cultural moment in the West, and has been called ‘the Discovery of Nature’ by Andreas Speer.

If the subject of my paper derives from the desire to talk about the king whom Warren Hollister knew so well, its title derives from R.W. Southern's famous British Academy Raleigh Lecture, ‘The Place of Henry I in English History'. The lecture reappeared in his collection Medieval Humanism and Other Studies under the title ‘King Henry I’. The original title is the more appropriate, using the word ‘history’ to mean both the past and writings about the past; the lecture situates aspects of Henry's reign both within long-term historical developments and within a broad range of historiography. Here, I hope to share some of this dual aspect but concentrate on legal history, a subject upon which Southern touched but briefly. In particular, I reflect upon periodization and upon the ways in which different historians and different types of legal historiography attribute different degrees of significance to Henry's reign.

Writers in Henry I's reign and its aftermath state their opinions clearly. The author of the Leges Henrici Primi referred to the ‘formidable power [tremendum … imperium] of the royal majesty’ and to ‘the pleas of the king's court, which stand above everything'. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle stated that ‘no one dared injure another in his time. He made peace for man and beast.’ Geoffrey of Monmouth's Prophecies of Merlin referred to the ‘Lion of Justice’, who was identified with Henry. According to William of Malmesbury, By the rigour of inflexible justice he restrained his countrymen peacefully, his nobles with appropriate dignity. He showed the greatest diligence in seeking out thieves and forgers in their dens, and punishing them when found. Nor did he neglect details; having heard that broken coins, although made of good silver, were not being accepted by those making sales, he ordered that all coins should be broken or cut. He punished the false ell in use among merchants, introducing his own forearm as a standard measure for all throughout England. … At the beginning of his reign, so that by fearful example he might make a lasting impression on evildoers, he was more inclined to mutilation of limbs, later to require monetary payments.

The focus of writers was thus on Henry's power throughout his realm, his maintenance of peace, and his dealing with offences such as theft and false moneying.